


Atonement

by iphis17



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: Agender Character, F/F, F/M, Profanity, abusive dynamics, suicidal ideations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-24
Updated: 2012-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-19 09:24:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/571747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iphis17/pseuds/iphis17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alison Edgley is missing, presumed kidnapped by the Nye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atonement

**Author's Note:**

> Written on the twenty-fourth day of January in the year 2012.

“I’ve changed my mind. Unchain me, please. Now.” There is a hint of panic to the voice of one Alison Edgley as she struggles against the bonds that are wrapped solidly and tightly around her limbs. She is slight, even for her youth, and not very strong, and so she is soon exhausted by her attempts at escape.

Ann Laqueus gives her a withering stare of contempt. She is one year older than Alison, and not nearly as well behaved. “I can’t,” she says simply, and she returns to trimming her nails short whilst humming a pop song and wondering when the Nye will be back.

\---

“My sister has been kidnapped. Query.”

“Yes, she has.” The skeleton angles his head away, as if to insinuate that he is refusing to meet his partner’s eyes.

“You did not tell me about this until two weeks after the fact. Query.”

“Yes, that is true.”

“You think it was the Nye. Query.”

“I do indeed think it was the Nye.”

“You are feeling particularly fucking _suicidal_. Query.”

“Look, Valkyrie, we thought we had it under control.”

“ _My sister was **kidnapped** by the **Nye** , and you thought you had it **under control**?_ ” Valkyrie Cain is not raising her voice. Much. She is also not slaughtering her longtime partner.

“We did, and I am sorry.”

“You’d better be, because you are dead. Fucking. Meat.” She pauses. “Unless you’re going to give me an excuse right now, and it better be damn good.”

“The Grand Mage has told me in no uncertain terms that if we go cavorting off on another private investigation that we will be summarily keelhauled.”

“And you thought that this was sufficient reason to just let my sister die?”

“There’s not guarantee that she’s already dead, Valkyrie.”

“She’s been _kidnapped_ by the _Nye_.”

“All the same, and you have to admit, she’s really quite annoying.”

“She’s _fourteen_. Of course she’s annoying.”

“You weren’t annoying when you were fourteen.”

“I’m guessing you were, though, because you don’t seem to have grown out of it at all.”

“Where are you going, Valkyrie?”

“To find my sister’s corpse.”

“The Nye has probably mutilated it beyond any recognition by now, you do realize.”

“Fuck you.”

\---

“Please stop. That really hurts.” Despite the almost civil tone to Alison’s voice, there is a certain amount of alarm in her eyes. She is sweating, and her breath is labored, heavy. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m scared. So please. Stop.”

“You don’t mean that, dear.” The Nye, tall and long-limbed and with its eyes sewn shut, looks a fair bit more feminine than masculine today, with a layer of light stitching over its wrists and neck that looks almost like ornamentation and wearing a long, gray coat that covers its ankles.

“I do. Stop it.”

“No.” It pauses for a moment, leaving the needle in Alison’s flesh so that she wants badly to squirm, wants to thrash around and scream. “Unless, of course, you’d rather I let my assistant draw your blood. She’s really quite bad at it, though, so if you’d like to get out of this alive, for a given value of _alive_ , I really do believe that you should let me finish.”

Alison says nothing, eyes screwed closed tightly. She gasps when the needle is removed.

“Good girl. Now, for your prize for behaving so well – would you like a room in which to stay, or would you rather just sleep with Ann? She certainly wouldn’t mind sharing.”

“I’d like to leave,” whispers Alison, and the Nye looks at her with pity.

“I know you would, dear, but just think of all the good you are doing by staying. Now, I think it would be best if you were to share with Ann. If it would make you feel better, I can set up another bed in that room.”

Alison thinks about it while the Nye gently bandages her thigh and spreads healing salve over her ankles and wrists. “Okay,” she says softly, at length.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” says the Nye. “I appreciate it more than you can imagine.”

\---

“Tell me where it is, China, and I might not set fire to your library.”

China looks carefully at the younger female, lingering over her eyes, and then she sighs. “The last confirmed sighting was seven years ago, Valkyrie, and that place has long burnt down.”

“You’re not telling me everything you know.” There’s an accusative spark to her expression.

“I’m not. Are you sure you want to hear this, Valkyrie?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who Ann Laqueus is?”

“I’m not sure. I know an Ann. She’s in the year above my sister in school. Alice is always talking about her.”

“There are rumors that she’s one of the Nye’s creations.”

“Oh,” says Valkyrie, looking shocked. “Fuck.”

\---

“Aren’t you going to tell me to stop?” There is nothing malicious about Ann as she thrusts her fingers into Alison, curling them and making the dark-eyed girl moan.

“No,” breathes she as she exhales, before quickly, shudderingly, inhaling again. There is a broken quality to her, like she is falling apart – which, she supposes, she kind of is.

“Why?” Fascination tints Ann’s voice, glints in her eyes.

“I don’t want you to.”

“Oh.” Ann pauses, considering this. “Good,” she says, and then she slither-slides down the bed to put her face between Alison’s legs.

\---

“You killed it.” Ann Laqueus is examining her nails, biting her lips, trying not to cry. For all her faults, she is loyal in the end to the one who made her, and the fact that she’s probably going to perish now hasn’t even crossed her mind.

“It deserved it! What was it thinking, kidnapping my sister? Didn’t it know that it was crossing me with that?”

“She gave herself up willingly, Cain. She said she wanted to undo some of the damage you’ve done.” There’s a bitter, mocking cast to Ann’s voice now, and she is looking Valkyrie straight in the eyes.

“What _damage_?” There is a brittle snap to her tone, and she knows the answer before she seeks it.

“You killed me.” Light and sing-song and almost breathless, Ann is smiling. “You thought I was possessed, and you killed me. You didn’t realize this at the time, but you did. You killed a _lot_ of people, Valkyrie, and you never once thought to stop and mourn them, because you had more important things to do. That’s okay, of course. Needs of the many and all that. Thing is, Alison didn’t want that, and she thought she’d contribute in the best way she can.”

“By running to a monster?”

“By raising the dead.”

“She isn’t a Necromancer. She’s being silly if she thinks she can.” Valkyrie is blinking.

“Think, Valkyrie. What happened with the Grotesquery?”

“It came back.”

“Why?”

“Because of an evil, evil man and a stupid, stupid cult.”

“Because you’re of Ancient blood, Valkyrie. That is why.”

\---

Valkyrie Cain feels her whole world fall away from her as she watches the face of her sister as the younger girl sees the Nye. She feels herself vanishing as she looks at the betrayal in Alison’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she knows that the words are not enough, will never be enough. Alison is clinging to Ann now, and she is crying.

“We know,” states the walking corpse levelly, and she brings her lover out of the room, leaving Valkyrie alone.

\---

It has been months, and Valkyrie has not healed well. She is uneven, rough, caustic and blunt, and at the same time, she never seems to live in the moment. Skulduggery notices, and he tries not to broach the subject. She nearly gets him killed, and he does.

Those in places of authority begin to get involved, and she knows from the first moment that she should try and avert their gazes, because she is finished once they get their hooks and barbs under her skin. She doesn’t, though, and that is testimony to her state of mind.

Prison is cold, and she feels like she has become nothing as she rots there.

\---

When she gets out, the first thing she learns is that her parents are dead. Alison is the one who has come to greet her, and she has grown old and worn – not in flesh, but in spirit. She wears now the clothing of a healer.

“I kill people for a living.” That is the second thing that Alison says, and the words hang unhappily in the air. “Those that are too old or too weak or too tired to be saved. I make that judgment every day, and I am haunted by it. They thank me for it, and still it haunts me.”

“I know.” Valkyrie’s voice is soft. “I know.”

“How did you ever survive it?” There is so, so much of the child in Alison now as she looks at her sister, the woman that she wants so badly to admire and cannot bring herself to.

“I forgot them for as long as I could, because there was always more that had to be done. I was lucky, in that way, or maybe just easily distracted.”

“That can’t be healthy.”

“It wasn’t.” Their silence rings. “How did things turn out with Ann, in the end?”

“She died.” Alison smiles grimly. “The Nye was the only one who was ever really good enough to save her. We tried, trust me. We went all over the world looking for someone who could help. There was no one. I killed her in the end, and she said that it was a mercy. She was my first.”

“The first one you killed, or the first one you fell for?”

“I forgot how blunt you were.” Alison is looking away. “She was both, and she was more. She was everything to me, and I’d like to think that, had things worked out differently, I would have become something to her as well.”

“You were.” Valkyrie clears her throat, looking unfocused. “I saw the look on her face when she was with you. You were a lot to her.”

“Really?” There’s a dull edge to Alison’s voice. “Thank you for that, then. I appreciate it.

Valkyrie moves in to embrace her sister, but she is pushed away.

\---

Alison returns home, and she sees the face of Ann, immortalized in the pictures she has framed so carefully, kept in her house, and she breaks down. She weeps and she cries and she tries to tear herself apart, to reduce herself into nothing, because that is what she feel like she is.

It horrifies her and it hurts her that her attempts are unsuccessful, but of course they are, because of everything that she is, and so she lies on her bed and she feels her tears drying and she feels her blood oozing away from a myriad places on her limbs and from her breasts and her stomach and her torso and her face, and she wishes that she were just bloodless, that she had nothing of the Ancient inside her, because then, finally then, she might get some peace.

The next day, she forces herself to clean herself up, and she hates herself. She tidies her house, leaves it in beautiful order. She then goes and makes her peace with Valkyrie, speaking calmly her words of forgiveness. They are raw, unrehearsed, but she means every one of them.

She is on the way to her clinic, running through every question she asks in her mind—why can’t you fight? Is there nothing left? What more can you do? Will you hurt others with this?—when she meets the woman with the worn eyes.

“Who are you?” she asks, and her voice sounds thin, and her expression is shocked, because suddenly she can feel her heart beating too quickly.

“My name is Philomena,” the woman says simply, and Alison knows that she will not die. Not today.

\---

She continues to live her life by taking those of others, and now she begins to do so without contrition, because she knows, finally, what it is to be one of them. She saves some, as she ever did, and she is comforted by the fact that she would have saved them anyway. Without guilt, she removes those who can remain no longer.

In the fullness of time, she begins to see her sister again, when Valkyrie is out with Skulduggery and they are working too, living their lives by restraining those of others. She still cannot admire her sister, but she respects her now, and that is enough for her.

She still hasn’t forgotten Ann, and she probably never will, but she’s going to give things with Philomena a chance. It’s important to her.

She sleeps easily now, because she bears no more regrets – none of her own, and none of those around her. Finally, she has stopped living to mend what her sister has broken.

Finally, she is her own person.


End file.
